Sam Calling
by Foolscapping
Summary: S9 AU. Sam leaves after Gadreel leaves. Years go by. This is what happens when Sam calls. (Warning for character death.)


**Author's Notes:** This one is super rough and I'm not at all happy with any of it from a writer's perspective, but I figured what the hell! Might as well post it. It's got some harsh Dean in it, but it smooths out near the end.

 **Summary:** " It's not like Dean waits for a call, thinks maybe one of these days Sam'll be that sappy-eyed guy who can't help but dial in and see what's going on. But then, Sam didn't bother writing letters or leaving messages when he was at Stanford, so… So fuck it. It's done. That's all she wrote." Sam walks out on Dean after Gadreel. AU, not featuring the MoC.

 **Warnings:** character death, grief, grumpy negative dean (haha)

* * *

The bunker has been quiet for a long time. Dean hasn't bothered keeping track of much, but he does know it's been at least five years. Five years since Sam walked out after Gadreel, five years since he had told Dean he wasn't coming back to this place, five years since Dean heard Sam's voice. Which is fine by Dean — if this was enough to rip apart everything they'd built? This mistake? Then fine. He has enough guilt to feed a small village for a few years; he told Sam he was poison, and Sam listened. Good. Good for him. It's not like Dean waits for a call, thinks maybe one of these days Sam'll be that sappy-eyed guy who can't help but dial in and see what's going on. But then, Sam didn't bother writing letters or leaving messages when he was at Stanford, so… So fuck it. It's done. That's all she wrote.

Cas stops by a lot, nudges him to look for Sam. Tells him Sam's just upset and trying to find himself, probably. And god, Dean gets it, you know? He gets it. He fucked up; he's just — selfish enough to wish Sam would just build a bridge and get over it, and he knows that's shitty, and he knows it's more complicated than just lying to Sam innocently. It was Sam's worst nightmare. It was worse than dying. Kevin was gone. And that was Dean's fault, no matter how much Sam beat himself up over that… that was on him. He might as well have burned the eyes from the kid's head himself, with how much trust he depended on from him. How much he just expected everything to go smoothly, with a potential killer listening in the next room. He dreams about it a lot, wakes up screaming because he's dreaming about putting a blade through Sam's heart, or sometimes thinking Sam's been abducted again… but it's just that Sam's gone.

 _Gone, gone, gone._

And it's been five years, and he's not coming back. And you know… Dean's let good ol' Jack Daniels and his hunting network keep him busy. He tries to pretend this wasn't all his own doing, the infinite quiet in the bunker. It's crazy how much noise Sam actually made, even when he wasn't making any noise at all — the rustle of pages flipping, the sound of bubbling coffee, the clank of dishes or the oldies records spinning in the main room. Yeah, it's quiet. Enough to drive a guy batshit crazy.

But Sam's gone.

"Fuck 'em," Dean says one night, to one of his hunting friends. He's drunk and full of shit, full of himself but too determined to save face in front of the crowd; he doesn't tell them specifics. He knows he'll be the bad guy if he does, and while he deserves it, he's chickenshit to face anyone's judgement right now. Too ready to punch them in the noses. Like father, like son. He's not the easiest man to deal with when his fuse is lit. "He ran off and ditched me. It was supposed to be me and him 'til the end of the line, you know? I fucked up, but he didn't give me a chance to make things right. He took off. Again."

And of course, when he wakes up in the morning and finds himself hurling into the toilet because what the _fuck_ was in that whiskey, he feels like a complete asswipe, muttering apologies to the toilet as if Sam were a fucking toilet, and isn't that just salt to the wound, for him to unintentionally turn Sam into a toilet? So, yeah. He's a hot mess. Cas is busy repairing Heaven, so he doesn't much bother him unless he's real desperate. Charlie is — dealing with her own shit, out hunting, but she checks in on Sam and passes along how Sam's doing; it's as close to hearing from Sam as he gets. Krissy's coming along great in the gig, but she's considering retiring herself (which is a good idea, as far as he's concerned). Garth, um. Garth was taken out a few months back, and that fucking hurt like a _sonofabitch_. Jody's okay, though. Jody and Alex, they're good. After he and Cas got Claire back, she'd been living with 'em, going to school, finding a guy to settle down with.

So it goes. And goes. _And goes._

Eventually, Dean gets sick of the pity party and goes out on a roadtrip, looking for whatever creepy-crawly there is. Business is less than usual, which is actually a good thing; it means that there's less out there able to murder people. Though, admittedly, his mind has been drifting more and more to the fact that they're wiping out whole species. It has to be done, he thinks, because they're living off _human beings,_ and no matter how shitty it is, you're supposed to preserve your species first, right? But still. All this second-guessing. And he doesn't feel the rush he did five years back. Or even twenty years back, if he's honest. He doesn't feel the simplicity of it all, if he'd deluded himself into thinking there was such a thing.

In his dingy motel — cockroaches, cigarette burns on the mattress, broken window — his phone chimes on the nightstand over and over. It has to have rung a good five times before Dean looked at the caller ID.

 _Sam calling…_

He stares at it for a long time, suddenly pissed as hell; it's eight-thirty at night, and his brother finally decided to call him and end five years of silence? Seriously? Charlie had told him how Sam got this look of regret sometimes when Dean came up… but he was fairly certain his brother had truly ditched him. But this long? Really? He stares and stares, and the phone stops ringing. And then he stares for a few more minutes, his heartbeat racing and his fingers curling on the lip of the mattress.

He remembers what he told Sam, when he told him he wasn't coming back. When Sam had spent several dodgy weeks not speaking, until he finally came out and announced he was hitting the road, all determination and broad shoulders and caution. Like Dean was gonna try to stop him. And maybe he would have. Should have. Too late. _'Guess this is it, huh? You're abandoning me for real this time? Good for you. Get lost.'_

 _'Yeah,'_ Sam had told him, gritting his teeth. He pushes back, _'Guess I should go find someone who actually gives a shit about me and won't force whatever down my throat. Have fun being alone, asshole.'_

 _'Anything's better than dealing with your fucking tantrums!'_ Dean had growled. And he was wrong to have said it. Because it wasn't just — he knows it was more than that. But fuck if Sam didn't know how to push all those buttons. And he sure did. And then he left, never came back. And now he's calling? After thirty minutes, he finally gets the courage to pick up the phone and call back (and his finger hovers over the dial button for a long, long time). But it just rings and rings, goes to a voicemail Dean hasn't heard in a very long time.

Well, guess he fucked that one up.

His stomach twists.

Something's wrong, though.

Something's… wrong.

* * *

Less than half a day later, he's dressed in his finest FBI suit, staring down at his brother's body.

* * *

It's a small house in a small town, all rural and homely and quiet, and Sam's sprawled out in the middle of the living room with his chin tilted to rest against his shoulder, blood dried on his chin and up his cheek and nose, a tacky pool smeared all over like macabre, rundown snow angels. He'd struggled to move. Struggled to take his phone, clenched tightly in his hand. Struggled to make call after call after call — to Dean.

It's hard to say what reality was, anymore. It all felt more like a detached dream. Even as he had knelt down to look into his brother's transluscent face, looked overthe small but lethal puncture wounds all up and down Sam's chest and stomach, he couldn't fathom how to react — because it wasn't real, right? It wasn't real. When nobody's looking, he crouches down and peels Sam's phone from stiff fingers. He touches the skin there shakily, feeling the lifelessness, the coldness of the flesh there.

It wasn't real. Couldn't be. But it was. _This was Sam._

Eventually he's in the backyard vomitting and crying so hard his eyes are scalding, slamming his forehead into an old oak tree, trying not to scream. He's shuddering instead, and dripping snot and feeling smaller than small by the time the sun is setting outside, and wouldn't you know it… he can't stop apologizing. "I'm sorry — Sam, I'm sorry. Please. Please. I take it back. I'm _sorry_ ; wasn't a tantrum, wasn't stupid, wasn't your fault. Wasn't your fault at all. I did it — I'm so fucking sorry."

The guy who had decided to run a knife into Sam's back and chest and neck, turns out, had been gunned down just a few miles away, after pulling a big-ass double barrel on the cops; as if that would have worked. Dean saw through his gameplan. Just a pathetic piece of shit burglar. He was afraid of spending life in prison, rotting away. Like his brother's body would, if he didn't burn him soon.

 _Ha._

Dean's hand flexes, remembering the rusted steel of Alistair's scalpels.

* * *

By the time he's back at the house a few days later, jacket and tie discarded, he finds people putting down candles and flowers; some kid with curly brown hair and pale eyes – about nine, ten – puts a stuffed dog doll down. Dean just… watches. An older couple is wiping at their eyes and placing down pictures, more pictures of an adult Sam than Dean's ever seen before. All laugh lines and contentment, staring into the camera — into Dean — like Sam's watching him from another world, some place Dean was too afraid to walk towards. He's fishing in one of them, with the older guy. He's sitting on a train in one, on the other end of a chess board. He's curled up with some dog that looks old and brittle.

 _ **'WE LOVE YOU, SAM, REST IN PEACE',**_ one of the cardboard signs reads.

There's no common sense in a place like this. Like his father, like his mother, there's no answer to any questions you throw at the wind; it's just _why_ , over and over, until you're walking in circles and your feet are scabbed over and bleeding, but it's still the same words over and over. _Why, why, why?_ If there were ever a time Dean was suddenly willing to step off the edge of a very high cliff, it'd be right about now. Which is pathetic, because he hadn't spoken to Sam in a half a decade — he wouldn't have even known the loss he suffered, if he hadn't begrudgingly dug deeper. He lost his brother and almost never knew he did.

Now there's a hole, bigger than he thought possible. Sam's absence had been one, or so he'd thought… but now, he truly knows that the silence of Sam being gone feels like. It's indescribable, really. Unexplainable, how much you regret once it's over. Unnatural, how much you suddenly remember in the wake of never getting another memory on earth. Sam would be in Heaven, right? Did Dean get to see him there? After all this? He remembers their Heaven and the bitter, heated looks — thanksgivings, Stanford, Flagstaff. Sam's living quietly among those memories now… maybe regretting them.

Dean clenches his fists in his pockets, watching mourning crowds with dry, tired eyes.

* * *

He lingers. For longer than he thought he would.

He finds a map in Sam's old duffel, different little locations highlighted. One place is the beach. A sunny, calm beach, where he drives the Impala and then sits on the shore, unsure of what compels him to be here; it's just… it's a little piece of Sam, right? He holds up one of the pictures from the hallway of Sam's one-bedroom house and aligns the pier where he sits. This is where Sam was, years ago. This is where nobody but him will know Sam sat. It's a bizarre thing. He looks at the photo in his hands and feels like Sam'll start moving in it any second, grinning and talking with those deep dimples.

The photo doesn't move, though. The waves come up and grab at his ankles, its attempts to pull him in futile. He visits the pier itself, orders a hotdog from the stand and watches people fish on the edge of the rickety old deathtrap. The whole place reeks of greasy amusement park foods and seagull shit, and it makes him violently angry all of a sudden. That fucking asshole let a crazy fucking burgular get the jump on him. He's a fucking _Winchester_. He's defeated Lucifer himself, plunged them both into hell. He's skilled at how many different weapons? Trained how much of his childhood? And in the end, Sam drops his guard long enough for some motherfucker to sever his lower spine. Crunch. That's that. He didn't stand a chance.

The anger fizzles out, though. Slowly, slowly with the setting sun.

… It's pretty out here. He knows why Sam came here. With this thought calming his mind, Dean sits until nightfall, unable to think of anything other than his brother's waxen face splattered with blood.

Sam had called him at the end of the road.

He had called for him.

And Dean had let his last moments be the full mailbox of a tired old hunter.

The wind is a weak whip snapping at his neck, and he shivers.

For all Sam knew, Dean couldn't have cared less about him.

* * *

There's a trail, the old couple says, that Sam ran every day. Dean imagines it — imagines his idiot hulking brother pulling his hair back, dragging on some sweats, some sweatbands. He imagines him getting inventory on a water bottle, his step counter, his stupid Ipod. Dean isn't sure why he bothers staying in Sam's old home in the first place, but he's even more unsure why he decides to run the entirety of the trail behind the house. Sam would've mocked him lightly for it, teased him for being secretly active. It's just — it feels like he's chasing a ghost, if he's honest. Chasing a memory.

Running to catch his brother, before he'd regret it all. Stop him from wiping off his neck and showering, from getting into his night clothes before the blade plunged in deep. He runs until his lungs want to burst, reaching out for a shadow that is all in his imagination. But he sees Sam, as easy as he pants for oxygen: his broad shoulders, the way his lean but scrawny chicken legs move effortlessly, the swing of his arms as he powers through his life.

Dean isn't like that. He doesn't power through anything; he stews in it.

 _Come back,_ he thinks. He runs and runs, and never catches that image in his head.

He does find an old bench, though, that overlooks an old meadow there, all teeming with nature. Talk about finding his zen, right? Sam's full-on George of the Jungle. The thought, much to his disappointment, makes him smile. He doesn't want to be happy about anything, when it comes to Sam. He should be upset for a long, long time, right? That's how death worked. Laughing about it meant you were losing yourself to the realness of it all. It meant Dean was trying to cope. And he didn't want that.

 _What does it matter?_ the voice tells him, _You haven't seen him in a long time._

Maybe he's been chasing Sam's ghost way before he died.

He glances up, looks long and hard at the big oak tree. Something is scratched into the wood.

S.W.

His tongue sticks dryly in his mouth, throat tightening up.

Proof of his brother's life, right there. Proof of his brother.

He hesitates for a long time, but eventually, he slices into the wood.

S.W. D.W.

* * *

"It was a pretty tough pregnancy," Regina says. She had been a hunter that's since retired, lives just a town away from Sam. She gives Dean a mug of coffee and he drinks it down greedily, enjoying the burn; how long has it been since he drank a beer? Too long, he's thinking, but the drive is lost. As the woman sits, she looks across the yard at the child on the swings — the girl from Sam's little memorial service. The little girl walking outside of Sam's funeral, the one with the brown, wavy hair. "But um… anyway. I had finally got the brass balls to tell your brother about his kid a few years back. He was pretty surprised, really, but he explained… um. The whole soulless thing."

Dean freezes, glancing from the little girl to Regina.

Oh.

"You and he… when he was soulless?"

"Duh," she says, as if she knew the whole damn story behind it. "He was all over the country, you know? I wasn't exactly lookin' for getting tied down, but the pregnancy was sort of an accident. A pleasant one, mind, but still. When Sam learned about it, though, he figured he'd move close by. Keep in Gab's life, make sure we were financially stable and all that."

Regina clears her throat. It's been months since Sammy'd gone.

But it's still a wound, one straight to the lung. A sucking noise, pulling in the air around them, leaving them wordless, breathless. He sits with her and watches Gabriella kick her feet. When he sits to join her, in the sandbox, she swears on her collection of Barbie dolls that her dad always visits her when everyone else is sleeping. "I played the cello for Dad a lot… He's in the wind, you know," she says, smiling. "He uses it. The wind. He uses it like a brush, to brush my hair."

Dean feels the wind brush across his hair, too, and wonders.

"Uncle Dean," Gab says a year later, over a bowl of mac and cheese and cereal right out of the box, and some rock show on Nick. Regina's at work, making ends meet. Dean is simply Dean, simply the brother that keeps the lawn around Sam's home trimmed. Keeps the paint from peeling, the rooms from collecting dust. He's the keeper of Sam's things. The bunker is left behind to the others, nothing but his pictures following him out of their legacy; it was never really their truest one, anyway. "Uncle Dean? Dad's getting tired. He has a hard time."

It took Dean a very long time to understand. He ruffles her hair and nods, before stepping out onto the old wooden porch; the swing sways slightly, leaves rustling. It's silent, and yet there is noise within it, all homely and sweet and the most he's felt in a long, long time. Sam's old phone has always felt like its burning a hole in Dean's jacket — but now, as he pulls it out and thumbs over the plastic, he finds it simply warm and alive in his hands.

He's stopped imagining Sam's frantic last words, stopped thinking about how Sam must've let out a strangled sound of pain — how he must've asked over and over for Dean to answer, before he was gone and nothing would go forgiven, nothing would be fixed. Sam hadn't wanted it to end like this. Dean knows now, though — it hasn't ended. Not at all. And it won't end here.

He lays Sam's phone down on the rickety porch railing, staring out at the sky.

"It's okay, Sam," he whispers. "I'm here. You can leave. Okay? I'm sorry for everything. But you can leave. You don't owe me anything. And I'll make sure that they're both okay, okay? You… you can go. And I'll see you again, man. You and me. Done right. Round Two."

Dean's phone rings.

 _Sam calling…_

He doesn't miss the call this time; he presses the screen to his ear and hears Sam's voice distantly. He makes out the phantom noises of a struggle, of Sam's ragged last breaths after glass and wood crashing, of flesh being striked. And then a silence, as Dean's fingers curl tightly around the phone.

Sam whispers fondly through the hum of static, _'Goodbye, Dean. For now.'_

And Dean whispers back, "Goodbye, Sam."

 _For now._


End file.
